The first beta of WordPress 3.0 has just been released and I installed it to try out some of the new features. It’s in the early beta stage so I didn’t expect everything to work correctly, if at all.

Setting Up WordPress

The installation process went smoothly. It seemed like a typical WordPress install, except you had the option of specifying a password which will be used for your admin account. Earlier versions of WordPress gave you a random password which you used to login, and then change to a password of your choice.

The only problem with the password entry textbox is that characters are displayed in plain text, which is a security problem. This textbox should be set for password entry, i.e. <input type=password … > which would hide the characters that are being entered here.

New Themes for the New Version

The default theme has been replaced by the Twenty Ten theme. The new theme looks better than old Kubrick one and it gives a blog a more professional appearance.

Create a Blogging Community

WordPress 3.0 has merged with WordPress-MU so that it can host multiple blogs. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to get this functionality working. You need to manually make modifications to configuration files before you can start adding blogs.

The first step is to add the following line to wp-config.php,

     define (‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

Then you need to create a blogs.dir folder in the /wp-content/ folder.

If you are already logged in the backend, press F5 to refresh the page and you will see a Network menu item in the Tools menu. When I clicked on this, I was given an error message that I couldn’t install a network of sites on my server address, which it claimed was 127.0.0.1. Here is a bug for the WordPress team to fix.

General Usage of the Beta

I tried using some of the features, such as adding a new post and commenting on it. These worked correctly except that I couldn’t add a new category for a blog post.

I also tried creating a menu with the new feature they added. It wouldn’t allow me to create custom links and I wasn’t able to activate the menu in the widgets area. This feature needs a little work but it does seem interesting.

In Conclusion …

Other than then the integration with WordPress-MU, there doesn’t seem to be a significant difference from the previous version of WordPress. It still is, however, in an early beta stage so there may be more added later.

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